Leaked memo: e-mail recovery will outlast Bush presidency

A leaked document suggests that the White House will fail to recover thousands …

An internal memo suggests that the White House will be unable to recover thousands of missing White House e-mails by the end of George W. Bush's term in office. According to a document dated June 20 and leaked to the Associated Press, the White House IT shop has been soliciting bids from contractors to perform the recovery project, but the document estimates the work will not be completed until April 2009, three months after either Barack Obama or John McCain will have moved into the Oval Office.

The White House IT shop has estimated that as many as five million e-mails were lost between 2003 and 2005. The recent leak offers a rare glimpse at its progress in recovering them. The White House has treated the process like a closely-guarded secret. In June, a federal judge ruled that unlike most parts of the federal government, the White House Office of Administration is not required to respond to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. The White House told the AP that the leaked document was "outdated and seriously inaccurate," but refused to elaborate on what was inaccurate about the document or to provide any details about how far the recovery effort had progressed.

Archiving of government e-mail communications is required by federal law, yet the Bush administration has struggled since 2002 to comply with the requirement. The administration inherited a working archival system from the Clinton White House. But when the Bush IT shop decided to switch from a Lotus Notes-based e-mail system to one based on Microsoft Exchange, it broke compatibility with that software. Since then, the White House has repeatedly tried and failed to develop a new system. It first tried to retrofit the old Notes-based system to work with Exchange, but concluded that the approach was unworkable. It then took bids to design a new Exchange-based archiving system. According to one whistleblower, that system was finalized in 2006, but was reportedly mothballed at the last minute by White House CIO Theresa Payton, who cited vague performance concerns.

In the interim, the White House IT shop has relied on a clumsy manual system called "journaling," in which (in the words of a February Congressional report) "a White House staffer or contractor would collect from a 'journal' e-mail folder in the Microsoft Exchange system copies of e-mails sent and received by White House employees." Because the resulting files were saved manually and haphazardly on various White House servers, stuff tended to get lost. The memo estimates that there may be as many as 225 days with missing e-mails.

Some of the most significant e-mail losses occurred in the spring and summer of 2003, a period during which the White House was planning and executing its fateful invasion of Iraq. Yet the leaked memo suggests that the White House is not planning to attempt recovery of e-mails older than October 2003.

Despite its difficulties recovering lost e-mails, the White House IT shop has repeatedly rebuffed outside offers of assistance. The National Archives, the federal agency responsible for historical preservation of official government documents, has been warning the White House about problems with its e-mail system since 2004. It sent repeated messages during 2007 offering to help with recovery and preservation efforts, but its entreaties were apparently ignored. Meanwhile, two private organizations, the National Security Archives and Citizens for Responsibility in Washington, have been pressing the Bush administration in court over its e-mail preservation policies. In a May court filing, the White House insisted that it had everything under control, and that no court supervision of its recovery efforts was necessary.

Government projects are almost never completed ahead of schedule, so it's a safe bet that government IT workers will still be struggling to restore missing e-mails when George W. Bush leaves office on January 20, 2009. Documents of significant value to future historians may be lost in the confusion that invariably accompanies the change of administrations.